Sometime in the early part of this decade, Japan decided that “The Matrix” was the greatest thing ever and had to be aped in every game and movie that country will ever turn out. And no series has done as much apin’ as Final Fantasy. It should be no surprise, then, that the newest fighting game based on the Final Fantasy license, Dissidia Final Fantasy, tries its bestest to give you that Matrix experience… only with a lot of androgynous dudes thrown into the mix as well. As a result, the game’s aesthetic is likely to appeal heavily to Japanophiles (read: anime fansubbers and cosplayers) and alienate fans of more mainstream (read: macho) fighting titles.

The premise of the game sounds pretty cool, on paper: Take a character from each of the Final Fantasy games to date, then take a bad guy from each of those games, and put the whole mix up against each other in an epic battle for good over evil. Cloud, Cecil, Tidus, Sephiroth, Kefka, Squall, they’re all here. And, to the game’s great credit, each character has a vastly different set of moves and a totally different play style. Characters like Cloud and Golbez rely on slow, powerful attacks, whereas small, quick characters like Zidane and Kefka focus on combos and flitting around the screen like effete waterbugs. Everything is geared toward giving you a sense of fast-paced, aerobatic action, like a well-choreographed fight scene from a Hong Kong movie.

Of course, the actual meat of the fighting in Dissidia is based on nothing so flashy. Two numbers, Bravery Points (BP) and Hit Points (HP), drive the action. Landing basic attacks with the circle button damages your opponent’s BP and accordingly increases yours. In turn, you can unleash powerful special attacks with the Square button, doing HP damage proportional to the BP you’ve earned. Whoever reaches zero HP first loses, while reducing an opponent to zero BP increases their vulnerability to HP damage and reduces the power of their attacks to nil. Additionally, all fighters have an “EX” gauge that fills up during combat and, when full, can be used to unleash really powerful, unblockable attacks.

Environments also factor into the fights, as players can be knocked into traps (or out into nothingness), can run up walls and cliffs, and can dash and fly around wide-open areas in order to set up combos and look generally awesome. In fact, looking slick is one of Dissidia’s primary strong points. The game powerfully demonstrates the PSP’s graphical strengths, especially in the over-the-top cut-scenes. Unfortunately, even the power of the PSP is unable to rescue Dissidia’s voice actors from their lack of talent. The game’s story mode (it also has an arcade and a quick-battle mode) is rife with cut-scenes that tie into the characters’ backstories, and it’s also therefore rife with poorly delivered dialogue. Volume control is your friend.

Apart from the poor dialogue, Dissidia is a largely enjoyable game, although its attempt at shoehorning in a wide variety of RPG elements (including the mystifying ability to create equippable items by performing certain combos in battle) to an otherwise action-oriented fighting game ends up being confusing. While the game does give you interstitial tutorial tips during the loading screens, I found it hard to implement all the different combo varieties, item gets, special tactics, etc. that Dissidia throws at you. No doubt hardcore players who are interested in getting their hands dirty will take to such intricacies better than more casual fight fans, but be warned that there’s much more to Dissidia’s gameplay than meets the eye; like the game’s Japanophilia, it’s all a matter of taste.